BIRDS. 



213 



Meanwhile, our Ospreys are upon the verge of despair ; they are 

 in anticipation of rapid decadence and final extinction. The history 

 of this Loch Ordie nest, along with the evident relationship of its 

 birds with those of Spey and Loch an Eilean, as intelligent readers 

 can hardly fail to realise who read both this account and that which 

 we have before given in our previous volume on Moray — i.e. so far as 

 that has been written — I say that the history of this Loch Ordie nest 

 and its birds can hardly fail still to shadow forth a lingering hope 

 that all our resources of civilisation are not yet exhausted. With 

 scarcely a reasonable doubt, these Loch Ordie birds were offshoots 

 from Loch an Eilean parentage, and Loch Ordie and its broken- 

 topped spruce-tree had caught the keen vision of the surviving 

 autumn and spring migrants passing over twice- (or more frequently-) 

 travelled air-paths. Surely it is no marvellous stretch of my imagination 

 to say that the desperate fight which took place at Loch an Eilean 

 was between the old male of that eyrie and probably one of his own 

 surviving offspring which had escaped all previous endeavours to 

 annihilate him both at home and abroad, and had run the gauntlets 

 of murderous means both in Scotland and England, only to perish at 

 last. I give the fact, at all events, that there have been no Ospreys at 

 Loch an Eilean either in 1904 or in 1903. And I also give another, 

 that only one Osprey came back to the Lochiel's eyrie in 1904. Let 

 us pray that Lochiel will not cut down that tree, or give it to any 

 museum in the wide, tvide tvorld. And let me add : May any trans- 

 gressor who may be tempted by " filthy lucre " to do that same be 

 "blown up sky-high"; and if this passage happens to meet his 

 indignant eye, he may read it literally if he likes. 



Meantime, I conclude another chapter of sorrows in the history of 

 the Ospreys of Scotland. 



I have already mentioned that I gave myself the melancholy 

 pleasure of personally visiting this devastated site of these persecuted 

 species in 1905, accompanied by Mr. Eodgerof the Perth Museum, and 

 guided to the spot by the keeper by whom the bird was shot. I 

 reproduce one of the photographs of the site, showing the remaining 

 stump of the tree that was cut down. 



Millais informs me that the Osprey still appears occasionally on 

 passage in autumn, and he adds : " I watched two for a long time trying 

 to catch a grilse near Dunkeld. I have seen it on two occasions on Loch 

 Leven (Forth). Malloch has a lovely specimen, killed on Tay recently. 

 I believe it is one of the Loch an Eilean pair, as it is a perfect old 

 bird, and one of the pair (of the Loch an Eilean birds) was killed 



